This past week, investigative reporting revealed something that feels less like policy and more like a dystopian script: ICE is outsourcing parts of its enforcement work to private prison contractors, who then hire what are, in effect, bounty hunters.
A subsidiary of GEO Group — the same corporation that runs immigration detention facilities — has already received more than a million dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to help track down people these contractors suspect may not belong in the country. The contract could grow exponentially. These corporate investigators knock on doors, wait near job sites, and lean on “skip-tracing” tactics borrowed from the debt-collection world.
Unsurprisingly, advocates and witnesses say the dragnet lands hardest on people labeled “Latino,” because the net itself is woven from stereotypes. In the American imagination there’s supposed to be a certain look, a certain accent, a certain set of features.
Reality couldn’t be more varied.
“Latino” isn’t a race, and there is no single Latino phenotype. You can’t “look” Latino any more than you can look “American.”
Latino communities include Indigenous people, Black people, white people, and every shade and texture in between. Many trace their roots in what is now the United States back generations, and most Latinos in this country are U.S. citizens, the majority born here.
Meanwhile, immigrants — including people with and without legal status — come from every region on earth.
Boston, for instance, has thousands of undocumented Irish residents. People from Canada overstay visas. People from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East arrive and fall out of status. Yet the enforcement spotlight keeps circling the same communities.
Stereotypes, promoted through relentless propaganda in both news and entertainment media, shape suspicion, and suspicion shapes who ends up in handcuffs.
“Bounty Hunters,” Oversight, and a Growing Shadow System
Some critics have compared ICE’s outsourced skip-tracing and surveillance to bounty hunting, and there are anecdotes suggesting that precarious workers — including people recently out of prison — are being pulled into this industry.
What we do know for certain: private prison corporations and their subcontractors are being paid millions to locate and track human beings for detention (often in their own facilities) and deportation, and these programs operate with minimal oversight.
That pattern alone is alarming, even if every link in the chain hasn’t yet been fully documented.
When the Supreme Court Moves the Goalposts
Layer all of this onto a recent Supreme Court order, in which Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “apparent ethnicity” can be treated as a “relevant factor” when ICE decides whom to stop in Los Angeles — alongside language, job type, and location — and the implications snap into focus.
Civil-rights attorneys are clear about what this means on the ground: it opens the door to profiling, especially in communities labeled “Latino,” so long as agents — including, now, bounty hunters possibly hired directly from the private prison population itself — can point to some additional pretext while they do it.
And the premise collapses the moment you zoom out.
The idea that Spanish-speaking people are somehow “foreign” to the United States is a fantasy wrapped in historical amnesia. Spanish has been spoken in what’s now the USA for centuries. Vast stretches of what is now the United States were governed in Spanish long before there was a United States at all. Our maps say it out loud every day: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Rio Grande. Every time someone says they’re going to Las Vegas, they are speaking Spanish. Today, the United States is home to one of the largest Spanish-speaking populations on Earth.
The irony runs even deeper when you look at one of our most cherished national myths. So much of what we celebrate as “cowboy culture” was built by Spanish-speaking communities in the Southwest. The vocabulary gives the game away: vaquero, rodeo, corral, lariat (la reata), lazo, bronco, mustang (mestengo), ranch, stampede (estampida), chaparreras (chaps). These words didn’t trickle in as curiosities. They describe work that Spanish-speaking people developed here, on this land, long before modern borders existed.
Over time, Hollywood and the country-music industry rewrote the script. The white “John Wayne” cowboy archetype became the protagonist of the American imagination. Latino, Indigenous, and Black cowboys — the people who actually shaped the culture — were written out, turned into side characters, or disappeared entirely. A culture born in Spanish was repackaged as something exclusively “white,” then sold back to us as the most American Good Ole Boy thing imaginable. And now, when Spanish shows up in the very places that created cowboyin’, MAGA calls ICE on it.
Profiling people because they speak Spanish doesn’t make legal sense, historical sense, or moral sense. Language tells you nothing reliable about citizenship, legal status, or belonging in a nation where half the present-day territory was literally New Spain for centuries before it became part of the United States.
Building enforcement around Spanish is less like law and more like racist superstition whispered by a drunk frat boy behind his favorite rape dumpster.
I Went Looking for the Villains
When I first sat down to write about the private prison industry and its ties to ICE, my plan was simple: follow the money.
I wanted names. CEOs. Board chairs. Major shareholders. I wanted to see who sits at the top of the companies that run detention centers, supply surveillance technology, and sign the contracts that make all of this possible.
And the names are not hidden. They’re printed in annual reports and SEC filings.
At GEO Group, one of the largest private prison and immigration-detention contractors in the United States, the founder is George C. Zoley, who now serves as Executive Chairman.
As of 2025, the Chief Executive Officer is J. David Donahue, a longtime corrections executive. Their senior leadership ranks are packed with former ICE officials, career corrections administrators, and finance and legal professionals whose compensation includes stock and performance-based equity in the company.
At CoreCivic, another major detention contractor, Damon Hininger has served as CEO since 2009 but will hand the role to Patrick Swindle in 2026, after years of Swindle rising through the company’s finance and operations ranks. A cluster of executive vice presidents oversees development, finance, “innovation,” and government relations, and they too are paid in cash plus equity tied to company performance.
Around them is an ecosystem of surveillance and monitoring firms. GEO’s subsidiary BI Incorporated runs electronic monitoring and so-called “alternatives to detention” that still track human beings for ICE. On the ownership side, large asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and River Road Asset Management hold significant stakes in GEO, CoreCivic, and similar firms on behalf of retirement plans, index funds, and other pooled investments.
Here, for example, are twenty people whose formal roles sit right at the junction of immigration detention, private prisons, and the capital that finances them:
George C. Zoley
Founder and Executive Chairman of The GEO Group; Greek-born American businessman who built GEO out of a division of Wackenhut in the 1980s and has led its expansion into one of the largest private prison and detention companies in the world.J. David Donahue
Chief Executive Officer of GEO Group since January 2025; a four-decade corrections veteran who previously ran state prison systems and then oversaw GEO’s U.S. operations before being elevated to CEO.Paul M. Laird
Senior Vice President and President of Secure Services at GEO Group, responsible for the company’s core prison and detention operations; previously worked in federal corrections before joining GEO’s leadership.Joe Negron
Senior Vice President for Legal Services, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary at GEO Group; a lawyer and former President of the Florida Senate who now oversees GEO’s legal affairs and governance.Matthew T. Albence
Senior Vice President for Client Relations at GEO Group; before joining GEO in 2022, he spent 26 years at ICE and ended his government career as Acting Director of ICE, overseeing 20,000 staff and a multibillion-dollar budget.Daniel H. Ragsdale
Senior Vice President for Contract Administration and Compliance at GEO Group; previously served as Deputy Director of ICE, part of a broader “revolving door” in which former immigration officials now help manage GEO’s government contracts.Ronald A. Brack
Executive Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer, and Controller at GEO Group, responsible for the company’s financial reporting and accounting systems that track revenue from detention and supervision contracts.Shayn P. March
Executive Vice President for Finance and Treasurer, and Acting Chief Financial Officer at GEO Group; oversees corporate finance and capital markets activity, including the debt and equity that fund GEO’s facilities.Julie Myers Wood
Member of GEO Group’s board of directors; previously headed ICE under George W. Bush and is now CEO of Guidepost Solutions, which has a consulting agreement with GEO’s electronic monitoring subsidiary BI Incorporated.Lindsay L. Koren
Board member at GEO Group; formerly an attorney adviser to the Chief Immigration Judge at the Department of Justice, now helping oversee GEO as a director.Damon T. Hininger
President and Chief Executive Officer of CoreCivic through the end of 2025; started as a correctional officer in 1992 and climbed the corporate ladder to run one of the largest private prison and immigration-detention firms in the United States.Patrick D. Swindle
President and Chief Operating Officer of CoreCivic, scheduled to become CEO in 2026; joined the company in 2007 from equity research and has since overseen operations, facility activations, and “strategic development” initiatives that support growth.David M. Garfinkle
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at CoreCivic; has been with the company’s finance organization since 2001 and now oversees its financial strategy and reporting.Anthony L. Grande
Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer at CoreCivic, responsible for government relations, business development, and the pursuit of new contracts with federal, state, and local agencies.Lucibeth N. Mayberry
Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at CoreCivic; leads efforts to expand the company’s “community corrections” and real-estate businesses, both of which derive revenue from the broader carceral system.Mark A. Emkes
Chairman of the Board at CoreCivic; former CEO of Bridgestone Americas who now oversees CoreCivic’s board and plays a key role in executive compensation and strategy.Larry Fink
Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, whose funds collectively hold the single largest institutional stake in GEO Group and major holdings in CoreCivic through index and other funds.Salim Ramji
Chief Executive Officer of Vanguard since 2024, previously head of BlackRock’s iShares and index investing business; now leads the firm whose index funds are among the largest shareholders of GEO Group and CoreCivic.Ronald P. O’Hanley
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of State Street Corporation, whose asset-management arm State Street Global Advisors is also a significant institutional holder of GEO Group and CoreCivic shares.Abigail Johnson
Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity Investments, the privately held mutual fund giant whose funds and retirement products invest across the U.S. equity market, including in companies tied to private prisons and detention.R. Andrew Beck
Chief Executive Officer and Senior Portfolio Manager at River Road Asset Management, a value-oriented investment firm that appears among the largest institutional holders of CoreCivic stock.
These are not faceless entities. They are executives, board members, and asset-management chiefs whose jobs tie them, in different ways, to an economy that treats detention, surveillance, and incarceration as lines of business. Their compensation is structured so that when these companies grow their contracts and improve their margins, stock-based pay and portfolio values generally rise along with them.
It is easy to despise and blame these people. They have created a system that both echoes off of and rhymes with slavery, to profit from the devaluation, capture and control of marginalized human bodies. It is also easy to despite and blame the bounty hunters and agents they hire to do their dirty work for them.
But I realized something painful in researching this piece. Something harder to face.
Some of the same index funds and mutual funds these firms run are sitting inside my family’s retirement accounts and quite possibly yours.
And if we are truly ever going to end this horrific era in American politics and history, we need to talk about that.
Honestly.
I’m In This Web, Too
I wish this were merely a story about masked ICE villains and corrupt businesspeople and the politicians they buy off. That would be easier. Cleaner. It would allow me to stand above it, pointing fingers and throwing snowballs.
But the truth is more complicated.
My IRA is small, mostly from the decade I spent as a staff writer for the Boston Globe and the LA Times. These days, I’m a novelist and Substack journalist barely scraping by, with no money to set aside for anything. My “investment strategy” has mostly been hope and prayer that happened more than 20 years ago. And yet, my Nextar Media Group IRA, managed by corporate money managers, has grown rapidly and noticeably since Trump took office — in no small part because the market rewards corporations that profit from detention, surveillance, and extraction.
My son’s 529 College Plan, which I bought for him back when I was making good money off my novels and which he is using for post-graduate studies, is similarly invested in the same companies.
My father’s University of New Mexico pension is what allows the family to pay for the memory care home that keeps him safe. That fund sits in the same market, almost certainly invested in companies whose business model depends on confinement and control.
My mother, meanwhile, inherited stocks from her own mother. Most were in oil companies. Those investments enabled her buy, outright, the house she lives in now. One day, I will inherit that house. Which means part of my family’s financial stability comes from very industries that heat the planet, poison communities, profit from brutalizing black and brown people in the private prison system, and bankroll the very politicians promising to “crack down” on the people running from those crises.
So when I write about GEO Group getting paid by the United States government to hunt racially profiled people down, I’m not speaking from outside the story.
I’m inside it.
I’m inside it as someone whose meager family finances are trapped in the markets, and as someone who now carries a passport on me at all times, just in case.
The systems meant to keep families afloat — pensions, retirement funds, index funds, inherited portfolios — feed off a market that normalizes brutality, cages, surveillance, fossil fuels, and endless “security.” The comfort arrives sanitized. The damage happens elsewhere.
And if you have a retirement account, a pension, a college fund, a mutual fund — there’s a real chance you’re threaded into it, too.
Once you understand how deep the tentacles of what amounts to modern-day slavery reach, the question shifts from the easy moral theater of “Who are the bad guys?” to something much harder: What kind of country builds an economy where our sense of safety depends on other people being tracked, detained, and quietly erased from their communities?
The Easy Villains Aren’t the Whole Story
It’s tempting to stop at the level of the violent ICE agent with the mask. The raid video. The shouting. The zip ties. The naked children tied up and thrown into the back of a U-Haul. That’s where the pain is visible and obvious, and when something is that ugly, the human instinct is to point right at it and say: There. That’s the problem. Fuck ICE. Fuck the bounty hunters.
But look closely at who those ICE agents and bounty hunters are.
Many are young, poor and poorly educated. Many come from towns with disappearing jobs, collapsing schools, and housing costs that eat whatever wages remain. Recruiters promise higher pay than they might ever otherwise have dreamed of, health insurance, purpose. They can eat now. They can put their kids through college. They can buy a house. Things the system has made less and less accessible for ALL OF US. The uniform becomes a way out of debt, or out of a dead-end future. So they sign. They go through training. They get placed into a machine that was operating long before they arrived. Look at their eyes as protestors confront them. They know. They know it sucks. But they, too, are trapped.
Meanwhile, whole swaths of the country marinate daily in media ecosystems designed to make them afraid. The story they’re fed is simple and relentless: your job is at risk, your family is in danger, your community is changing, and the reason is “those people.” Brown people. Migrants. Spanish speakers. Pick a scapegoat and run the chyron on loop.
Fear is profitable. Fear glues people to screens. Fear keeps attention locked, clicks flowing, ads served, donations made, politicians rewarded.
And so the cycle spins.
White conservatives absorb the story and go to bed scared. They vote based on fear. They defend the fear. ICE builds bigger budgets. Private companies win more contracts. Investors see rising numbers. Liberal critics see the cruelty and direct their fury toward the “racists,” which feels righteous in the moment and satisfies the moral reflex.
Meanwhile, the people actually orchestrating the structure — the ones whose bonuses, dividends, and share values sit at the top of the pyramid — barely register in the conversation. The spectacle stays focused at the bottom where the pain is happening and the fighting is loudest.
That is the trick.
Racism does enormous harm. It fractures communities, justifies violence, steals dignity, and rationalizes policies that would otherwise be unthinkable. But inside this system, racism is also a tool. It keeps people divided. It assigns blame downward. It transforms suffering into a problem of “those people” rather than a problem of power.
The engine driving all of this is older and colder: a model of capitalism that treats human beings as inventory streams, that looks at detention beds the way it looks at hotel rooms, that calculates human misery as “utilization rate” and reports it quarterly.
As long as terrified white voters are convinced that migrant families are the threat, and liberals are convinced that the white voters are the real enemy, the money keeps flowing. No one with power has to answer for the contracts, the lobbying, the campaign donations, the procurement pipelines, the profit targets. Everyone is too busy fighting at the bottom of the pyramid while the top cashes checks.
This isn’t a call to excuse cruelty. Actions still matter. Harm still matters. Accountability still matters.
It’s a call to widen the frame.
Because once the frame widens, the story stops being about a handful of “bad apples” at the edge of a raid video and starts becoming a story about a system that requires conflict, fear, and cages in order to function.
And systems like that don’t reform themselves.
So what do we do with this?
If the problem were simply “mean agents,” the solution would be simple: punish the agents.
But we’ve just spent all this time mapping something deeper. Which means the response has to go deeper, too.
Here are places to start. Not purity tests. Not absolution rituals. Actual levers.
1) Follow your own money
If you have a retirement account, brokerage account, 529 plan, or pension, ask what’s inside it.
Look up your funds.
Search the fund’s top holdings.
See whether GEO Group, CoreCivic, or surveillance/monitoring contractors appear.
If they do, you have information. You can:
move to funds that exclude private prisons and carceral industries
write your plan administrator and demand options that screen them out
tell your financial advisor, plainly, what you want gone
You don’t have to be wealthy to make these decisions. Tiny amounts matter because millions of “tiny amounts” create markets.
2) Pressure the people managing money at scale
Institutional investors wield enormous power because they vote shares and shape corporate governance.
BlackRock
Vanguard
State Street
Fidelity
River Road Asset Management
Write them. Call them. Join campaigns that push them to divest from carceral profiteering and surveillance contracts. When they feel reputational heat, they move.
This isn’t symbolic. Proxy votes change corporate behavior.
3) Starve the lobbying pipeline
These companies lobby relentlessly.
Track where they donate locally. Track which sheriffs, county commissioners, governors, and members of Congress take their money.
Then:
show up at town halls
ask pointed, public questions
write letters to the editor naming the donation trail
support challengers who refuse carceral cash
Elected officials notice when their donors suddenly become liabilities.
4) Support people organizing at the bottom of the pyramid
There are groups doing the hard, unglamorous work:
legal defense funds
bail and bond networks
rapid-response networks for raids
organizations advocating for detainees’ rights
community immigrant resource centers
They reduce harm directly. They also gather the receipts that expose abuses.
Pick one. Contribute money if you can. Time if you can’t. Signal boost if that’s what you have.
5) Refuse the fear script
When someone repeats fear propaganda, ask for evidence — gently, persistently.
“Where is that from?”
“What’s the source?”
“What does the data actually show?”
Name the pattern:
Fear benefits people who profit from cages.
Don’t argue in memes. Don’t humiliate. Disrupt the script. Invite people out of it.
6) Tell the longer story out loud
One of capitalism’s biggest advantages is amnesia. It rewrites history as it goes.
So keep saying what is true:
this land was Spanish-ruled before it was U.S.-ruled
Spanish is not foreign to this continent
cowboy culture is deeply Latino
most Latinos here are citizens
immigrants come from everywhere
detention is a business model, not a moral crusade
Narratives shift culture. Culture shifts what is politically possible.
7) Demand laws that remove profit from punishment
Wherever you live, push for policies that:
ban private prisons and detention contracts
prohibit per-diem “bed quotas”
cut ties between local jails and federal detention
regulate electronic monitoring as punishment, not profit
end mandatory-detention statutes that feed guaranteed revenue streams
Public systems aren’t perfect, but they’re accountable in ways corporations are not. When profit leaves the equation, cruelty loses its financial incentive.
8) Hold complexity without paralysis
Yes, many of us benefit indirectly. Yes, our pensions and parents’ portfolios are tangled in this. Awareness isn’t meant to paralyze you.
It’s meant to give you targets.
The point is not personal purity. The point is power.
None of this happens overnight. The system was built to be self-renewing, self-protecting, self-justifying. It will fight back.
But once you see that racism is the tool and unregulated capitalism is the architect, you stop thrashing at shadows. You start pulling at the wiring.
And wiring can be changed.
Including your personal financial situation is helpful. Thanks for that. I'm sure it's not something you want to do but we need to work to open people's minds to the monster we're living inside. It's relatable and shows how we can't escape this thing, the blood-sucking, vampire economy.
We're inevitably implicated which isn't cause to give up but to fight back. I'm for getting uninvested where possible. When we have the chance, though, if ever again, this fucker needs to be taken down wholesale. They deliberately made it into a machine and those have weaknesses.
Because of how they're constructed. They don't have the resiliency of broadly-based, diverse systems. Diversity is stability and strength. This economy is a weed-free lawn of people in the exploitation biz. Which is inherently fragile, requiring massive subsidies. We're the weeds.
Or so they think. The idea is of course to have us pay, yet again, when it implodes. They've tried to rig it so we absorb all the costs when they fuck up. And they want to replace us with AI and automation, an inhuman and inhumane culture and economy, which is possible to an extent.
It's pitchfork time. Not to kill them but to remove them from power. The society and economy aren't only there to serve them (as they think) it's there for all of us. It's ours and we need to reassert those rights they've stripped from us, but not in a spirit of retribution. As justice.
Very important article! Thank you for all your research. I feel a bit helpless, but I look to history to see how countries/ regions begin to dismantle such unjust hydra-like systems and rebuild. Well... it's not easy and doesn't happen overnight. Takes generations. But first step is awareness, and then use every lever we have to hold those in control accountable. Remember the French Revolution. No more Louis XVI. Off with his head! And that was the end of the French Monarchy. People need to fight back and demand change if they want real freedom. After decades of peace post WWII, I feel we're at the precipice. And it's not Britain or Germany or France or Italy or Japan or the Middle East calling the dirty shots. The big bad aggressor is the new colonialist: America. And the thing is, this regime is slippery and subversive, they have so many people fooled and gaslit to believe they are the "good guys." People need to open their eyes. The real battle is between Truth vs Lies. And greed for money and power has always been what's on the table. What if we remove that somehow?